As a part of our History of Graphic Design module my fellow soon-to-be designers and I are to create blogs documenting our thoughts and feelings over the content of our curriculum. Researching, commenting and letting the whole world know how we got to where we are in design (and at the same time letting Miranthe know that some of the course content sunk in bit and that she didn't write the study guide for a bunch of paper wasting ingrates ).
As opposed to creating a stuffy academic blog written with a register as high as the himalayas (that only people who already knew all the information I would be blogging about would be interested enough to read just so they could correct me on how many chin whiskers Johann Gutenberg had or something) I've instead decided to be a complete rebel and try appeal to the average person who generally would'nt give a Da Vinci's- flying-machine-sh*t about the history of graphic design so that i can maybe give someone else a passion and respect for the past like I got when I started design. Learning cool things like that the alphabet was not derived from alphabet-soup or that the ancient egyptians had three writing systems, one for holy writings, one for official documentation and common writing (or as I like to think of it: ancient sms language).
How can I be so sure? Because (simply put) people are f**king CRAZY! And history is the story of how people have changed and evolved and how one form of crazy eventually becomes another or often several other forms of crazy. Yes it may sound quite crass and crude to explain the entirety of human history as if explained from someone on the Jerry Springer Show but I feel people disassociate history from their contemporary lives because of the clinical and academic way history is explained. The idea of history being boring has stopped most people from seeing the fact that there is a lot of just plain old interesting stories out there. You might watch Paris Hilton and think her promiscuous rich girl life style is crazy. Im talking Henry the Eighth: The King who invented divorce and executed a few of his wives while he stole money from monasteries, now that's rich and out of control. You think the latest issue of heat is interesting. Im talking about the INVENTION OF PAPER in ancient China B*tches!
Well actually as far as course content is concerned in third year we start by dealing with late Modernism going into Post-Modernism (like design around the second world war and onwards). So if you don't really know much about the history of graphic design already you've essentially walked into the theatre when Frodo is dropping the ring into the volcano. But dont worry, throughout the course of this blog and year I'll be periodically making a few retrospective posts just to give context to everything. Im also thinking about doing a one paragraph per chapter fly-by of the work we've covered over the subsequent two years, haven't decided.
Well, til next time...
